What is the Mail Downloads folder on Mac? Safe to delete?

Where it is

What it is

When you open an attachment from a message in Apple Mail, Mail saves a copy to the Mail Downloads folder inside its container and opens that copy. The attachment in the message itself is not moved.

The copies build up over years of opening PDFs, images and documents. They are easy to miss because the folder is deep inside your Library, where you never normally look.

The one thing to check is whether you edited an attachment after opening it from Mail and saved it in place. In that case the edited version exists only in this folder.

How big it gets

From a few MB to several GB, depending on how many attachments you have opened over the years.

How to clear it by hand

1. Quit Mail.
2. In Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder and enter ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads.
3. Look through the folder for anything you edited and want to keep, and move it somewhere else.
4. Move the rest to the Trash and empty it.
5. To stop it building up, open Mail > Settings > General and check the Remove unedited downloads option.

What happens afterwards

Nothing changes in Mail. Opening an attachment again saves a new copy, as long as the message is still in your mailbox.

How Diskzy handles it

Diskzy shows the folder and its size on the disk map, and you can find it with Search. Anything you remove from there goes to the Trash first.

Related guides

• Caches~/Library/Caches
• Logs~/Library/Logs
• Trash~/.Trash